Goodbye

I left the Warwick campus today. Much as I arrived: in the pouring rain.

And now I'm back in London, in my new home. A cheerful top floor of a pleasantly scruffy house down south. Lying on an unfamiliar bed, in the dim light of an dusky lamp, stone cold sober, thinking. And trying not to think too much about the one inescapable fact: I'm not going back there.

The richest experiences are rich precisely because they end quickly. A skydive, a jungle trek, even a month backpacking. You troll through the time taking action to take things forward. But the MBA had a community. When you're working and studying in each others' pockets and half the cohort lives a two minute walk away, you feel wanted, part of everything, alive, even in the most despairing moments late at night before an exam you know you're not ready for. It wasn't a year out; it was a life. And now it's gone and I'm already missing it.

Lots to do, lots on the calendar. But the dreamy green campus is behind me now, and I'm sad. In just two week there'll be another crop of bright-eyed MBA students using our Syndicate rooms, eating our doughnuts, sleeping in our beds. (And, if this year's anything to go by, each other's beds too.)

It was a great year. Thank you, Warwick University. Signing off.... now.

Dissertation's in

I take the last paper-and-book laden walk from Lakeside to the Business School. A brief pause, a few chance hellos, and a final walk up to the third floor. I hand the two newly-bound copies of my 171-page, 24,220 word dissertation to the office people and wish them well.

And just like that - it's done.

Four days to zero hour

In the game now. My final few days at Warwick University, still working furiously on my dissertation project, with the 25,000 word report due at noon on Friday. Only a hiccup with the Large Hadron Collider represents an alternative!

Bittersweet rush of a year in the classroom

The last roll call!

And just like that - it's gone. The 14 courses of the Warwick MBA, all teaching now finished. Just last assignments and a dissertation to take care over the next couple of months. A final MBA party, hastily arranged, happened last night, and for a few beautiful hours everything was like September again.

And it's been good. My only regret was I wish I'd ... got into it earlier. I don't feel I truly got the hang of studing and learning formally until Term 3; thinking back, terms 1 and 2 were nightmarish, winging it on worry and adrenalin. Trying to give the impression that you know what you're doing takes serious energy, especially when you don't.

But I've learned a few things about myself. I'm still a bad person, but perhaps a bit less bad than I was. And I realise now that I feel most strongly self-actualised when there's something to push against, like deadlines and course timetables and people to let down. Exhausting and depressing it's been at times, but it's also been... awe-inspiring.

Ha ha. Me, who's walked across deserts and sweated through rainforests, awestruck by a concrete college curriculum.

As an outsourced marketing guy I had essentially no obligations beyond turning a great headline, and that's the trouble: working alone breeds megalomania. I spent the previous six years detached from reality. During this year I've gradually started the long trek back.

So: one of the three wishes almost done: build a relationship with the academic world. The other two I'm surprisingly confident about*, too. I came here not to earn a degree, but turn around a life that'd grown stale, and maybe knock off a few of the rough edges I acquired in six years alone.

I'm at the end of nine months of hard work, and all I want to do is go back and do it again differently. But then everyone would.



*Not telling you yet.

Sweet smell of ... something

What a great surprise. Somehow I've passed all the Term 2 exams!

I expected to fail one and possibly three, given that a) I'm crap in exam halls, b) I'm not a finance guy, c) I'd deliberately chosen electives I'd find difficult (finance stuff), and d) I turned out to be the ONLY PERSON in the entire cohort doing FIVE of the bastards last term (three electives absolutely had to be on my list, which meant doing an extra one in Term 2 and one fewer in Term 3.)

And yet I've sailed through the rocky waters of the Examic Ocean. Not even 'weak' passes; only one score came a bit close to the wind, and on the assignments (the parts closest to reality) I've scored plenty, even in the finance stuff I'm no good at. Whooohooo!

Pleased that another quarter of this four-term MBA is done and dusted. But at the same time... a little disconcerted. Shouldn't it have been harder than this?

I expected the numbers stuff to be hard; I don't have a bad head for figures, I just know nothing about maths save an interest in concepts, so the algrebraic bond pricing derivative greek whatever has been hard work for me. And despite being a marketer of 15 years' experience, I haven't done well in ANY of the marketing courses this year.

As 'soft scientists', marketing professors don't really want anyone whose experience was gained in the real world taking their programmes; it offends their sense of how the world ought to be. And it's showed in my results: steady sixtysomethingpercents all the way through. (The stuff I wrote was perfectly valid marketing: it just wasn't THEIR marketing.) But even so, those scores weren't difficult to obtain.

I'd love to say I've been up until 2am every night studying, absorbing texts and case studies and burning away blood in the Learning Grid. But I just haven't. (Except for the 2am mornings in the Learning Grid. But I'm a 'night' person by nature.)

The only genuine problem for me was all the group work an MBA entails; when you've been working as long as I have, some academic's idea of what constitutes 'group working' tends to be both artificial and insultingly juvenile. On the POM course I felt like Kindergarten Cop. And a course packed with representatives of a single nationality didn't help the time management aspect - or indeed the 'diversity' such courses like to trumpet.

(British MBA courses draw most of their cohort from the subcontinent these days, but for me, 'Shout at each other excitedly at high volume until someone listens' isn't ideal academic practice. I came here expecting a degree course in the Western intellectual tradition, yet what I got was... Mumbai Central at rushhour.)

But that's besides the point. I didn't really swot or sweat blood from my forehead.

I just did what I always do. Opened a textbook the day before and... winged it. Which I've always been good at, too good at to stop. Winging it through life, on a feather-thin slice of cash and the ability to string a sentence together. I'm a fraud.

Or maybe I'm just fooling myself, and this is how everyone works.

I am scared to death of my Investments & Risk Management lecturer

I can't believe it's here so fast, but it is. My last module of the Warwick MBA is this week! And the lecturer is already scaring me shitless. What is this, Corporate Finance all over again? Another megabrained lecturer who I'm sure sneaks off at every break just to laugh at my incompetence with financial calculus?

Hell no. It's worse than that.

This one's got such a long CV I can barely believe she's one person. She taught at Princeton, Oxford, and probably the InterGalactic Alliance of Extremely Clever People before Warwick; I've just been down her list of papers and most of them may as well be written in Latin. Whereas the Corporate Finance lecturer had a brain only moderately larger than that of Einstein, this one could have lectured Einstein and probably found reasons not to give him a pass. ("Think you're getting out of that patent office anytime soon, Albert my boy? HUR HUR HUR HUR HUR HUR!!!")

Investment & Risk Management requires Corporate Finance as a grounding, which means it's going to be harder. Looking down the programme (I should possibly have started this more than 24 hours before the first lecture) there are long lists including things like Forwards and Futures, Derivative Swaps, Bond Portfolios (shaken not stirred) and enough greek letters to keep the Athens Post Office busy for months. Just how big IS their alphabet?

There's a whole day on 'Options'. I think my 'option' will be to sit with my head in my hands and sob quietly so she won't ask me questions. Help!

I am quite pleased I could now hold a conversation with a CFA

Copy from an ad for the CFA (Certified Financial Accountant) institute: "If a CFA charterholder sits before you, she or he can evaluate undervalued and overvalued securities, calculate the values of callable bonds and puttable bonds, calculate alpha, calculate financial ratios used by credit analysts, analyze derivatives, alternative investments, taxes, pensions, inventories, and inter-corporate investments."

It's interesting to note that with the right electives, the Warwick MBA teaches you how to do every one of those things.

Database driven life

One of the really impressive things about Warwick University is its databases. Or more to the point, the way its databases connect to the student intranet and let me, slumped in my study bedroom, collect pretty much everything I need to write my assignments and dissertation.

Take just now. An article referenced in one of the readings for a Strategy module caught my eye. It's not in the readings, although it's a seminal article on the globalisation of business from the 1980s. This is probably a test: the course director may have left that article in plain view, referenced in the folder's readings but not actually in the folder as a handout, in order to see which clever buggers would spot it and look it up.

So I look it up. A few clicks and searching into the library, the business section, and a subscription index. A search on author and title. And - within a second - it's there: the full-text article, not in ASCII but an actual scanned page of the Harvard Business Review from 1983, complete with foxy-edged pages and the imprint of someone's pen pressed too hard on a previous page a quarter of a century ago. Brilliant.

In the vastness of the Internet, I inhabit a more tightly-clustered node: an ordered space of indexed scholarship, given shape and form by subscriptions and module structure and the sheer buzz of a campus wired for desseminating knowledge. From my little room here, I'm wrapped in a warm, comforting coccoon of information plus the means to make sense of it.

I'm going to miss this place.

WBS scavengers

Long after nightfall, in the darkened halls of the Business School, the denizens of the MBA programme go hunting.

At intervals impossible to predict, they emerge from their dens, often in packs. Hollow-cheeked and glassy of eye, they seek only one thing: sustenance to carry them through the night's project work.

This is their habitat. They know its every nook and cranny; they have made it their home. They work and play and sleep here. And at this hour, they know where food is to be found.

There's always a company event or presentation evening going on in one of WBS's lounges, and where these people gather, there is prey. The prey: leftover buffet. Sandwiches, cakes, and if you're lucky some of those yakitori things or the chicken pieces with pepper.

It may be in the upstairs lounge, where the central terrace glows eerily in the spring moonlight. Or the hall opposite, where the strange coven known as the Alumni meet for their lunar rituals. Sometimes the MBA wing itself, although in this area the hunters are many and the land overgrazed; but venturing further afield, to the smaller rooms of the 3rd or even 4th floors, can yield rich pickings for the alert hunter.

The prey has been found: a consulting company presenting in a meeting hall. Swiftly and silently, the MBAs take their prey without a struggle, and slink back into the syndicate rooms from whence they came.

Back to skool

Term 3 begins! After a couple of weeks out of the classroom (but still mostly on campus), the last few modules are on the calendar. And it's as if we'd never been away.

This term's modules are differently flavoured: intensive one-week crammers rather than a lecture a week all term, and us fulltimers share them with visiting Modular and Distance Learning MBAs, all of whom seem equally great people. But the format? FOUR shorter lectures a day and project work (case study writeups and a presentation) in the evening, all of which is due this week. Twelve-hour days are the norm this week, plus a couple more hours doing the 'further reading' at home. I'm whacked already.

Other life events are happening apace, too. A work project in from Madrid and another from Paris which is probably going to involve a week over there; I'm also catching lifts to (possibly) two skydiving events over various weekends, to get in a couple of jumps between Strategic Brand and Risk Management modules in May. Not to mention Dreamforce Europe down in town, which I may have to cancel if the French are cool with my day rate. A student can hardly turn that down.

Strategising, skydiving, working for Spain, trips to France, talking to recruiters and visiting technology shows. My life's coming back in a rush.

I really like a certain shade of rich red

I know it's not exactly an earth-shatteringly blogworthy event, but I just really like the way my new Warwick Business School USB key matches my iPod.

Building my MBA dissertation literature review

I knew the second half of my MBA would be easier. Still several courses to go, but the main thing now is my consultancy project and dissertation, which I'm doing on the connection between book value and shareholder value - in other words, the part of a firm's value that can be vaguely attributed to 'marketing'. But while a big job of doing stuff then writing about it isn't the hardest thing in the world for me, it's not quite as easy as I first thought.

The reason: it's an academic piece, not an act of copywriting. Which means an important part of the work is finding where it fits into the broader intellectual universe: getting a grip on the landscape delineated by peer-reviewed journals and seeing where your ideas are best built.

It's what one OB lecturer calls a "heading the cricket ball" problem. If your idea of playing cricket is to HEAD the ball being bowled at you, you're unlikely to be regarded as as serious cricketer. Not only that, but your 'innovative approach' wouldn't score you any points, and the whole activity would just give you a headache.

Which for a non-academic raises the question: which papers? Which textbooks? How do I know, when building my reading list, that I'm reading the right stuff?

Fortunately, I've found a shortcut that makes it easy.

One of the resources at WBS (what did researchers ever do without the Internet?) is a comprehensive database with searchable full-text articles from several hundred journals... with the number of citations attached.

Citations, not keywords, are the key concept here. If a paper in my multitude of search terms has been cited a hundred times by other authors, it's a reasonable bet that paper is 'significant', a seminal work in the field. Following the trail of the papers cited in that paper make the method even stronger: most of the people citing that paper will also have read whatever papers it cites. By this process, I can quickly find the 'core' dozen or so papers relevant to the subject I was searching for. Which for a field like mine (brand valuation) tells me precisely where the needles are in the haystack.

In a way, this is doing a 'manual google' - the PageRank algorithm at the heart of Google uses precisely this principle to rank popularity of web pages. Who's linked to you, and how many links you've got. I'm just doing it by hand. Some more whittling down to be done, but in just a day I've got ten papers that seem to lie at the root of this branch of marketing.

Sometimes, I could almost believe I'm smart.

Last of the BHBs

The last Big Honkin' Binder - Investments & Risk Management - has just joined my bookshelf. And that's it, complete in 14 volumes: The Warwick MBA on paper!

Technically, each of these binders has cost £1500 (or at least what they represent: the 14 courses making up the degree.) I wonder how fast the payback will be once I get back to the real world? Not that 'the real world' is a place I've ever spent much time in...

One Hundred Years of MBAitude

Yikes! The MBA qualification is 100 years old today! This calls for a celebration. What shall I do, my Strategic Brand pre-reading chapters or my Strategy & Practice case studies?

What I want to know is, did those first 33 guys at Harvard in 1908 (the class of 1910) have the same trouble with Corporate Finance? Probably yes, although I bet there was less Modelling & Analysis, Excel being somewhat pre-alpha at the time.

Wait a minute - they only studied THREE courses?!! What kind of sleepwalk-through, revise-on-the-bus, wing-it kind of degree is THAT?!!

Despite which, only eight completed the course, a 76% flunk rate. No wonder the Wall Street Crash happened just nine years after they graduated!

Hail to the BHB

There are a lot of Big Honkin' Binders on the Warwick MBA, but nothing seems to blunt the thrill of opening a new one. And I've just collected another one in prep for Term 3.

Creaking the fresh spine open for the first time offers near-orgasmic excitement. The immensity of readings and pre-readings, the case studies, the structure of tabs and sections and Assessment criteria. Term 3's courses are shared with the part-time MBAs - taught in intensive one-week modules rather than spread over a term - but the binder metaphor thankfully remains as the guiding collective noun of each course, heavy and plasticky and beautiful.

These Big Honkin' Binders are, of course, a major selling point for the Warwick MBA: they're 'giving us something', weight and heft to the knowledge offered. Looking back at the BHBs from Terms 1 and 2, I've made each one mine: covered in Post-Its, notes in margins, filled-in boxes and printouts hole-punched and bound into context by my own hand. These binders are now part of me.

Just as a handwritten letter on 160g watermarked vellum means more than a text message, these binders are worthy containers for the riches of a top MBA, even if much of the course material and interaction happens in electronic form. And I'd bet that even when laptops have the same contrast, clarity, resolution and portability as a sheet of paper, these binders will still be around.

Post mortem: Strategic Advantage

Executive Summary: hard part's over!

OK, so there are a couple of assignments to do before end March, but the Strategic Advantage exam - two essays, two hours - was a pleasant finish to exam week. Not too rushed, took a five minute holiday in the middle, managed to shoehorn a Porter's Five Forces diagram and the distinctive assets pyramid in there. Had 10 minutes spare at the end so I thought I'd add an Appendix with the Value Chain! And why not. (Appendices are cool.)

And now the first half of my MBA is over bar the resits, oops, I mean bar the shouting. Today is the last day the 80 of us will be together as a cohort, sharing a core of content: from this day forward, we go our separate ways, into diverse electives and project/dissertations.

In some sense, I'm already missing it.

Hands in pockets against the not-yet-Spring weather, I wander the emptying campus of what I've come to know as 'my' university.

University House, a beautiful chunk of geometric white angles and a soaring four-storey atrium that's become one of my favourite places. Coffee in the cafe at the Arts Centre. The card entry gates of the library. The short walk down the curving road, assorted buildings of the university becoming denser like scattered foothills. The humid humanity of the Sports block. The gangrenous 1960s wasteland of Humanities. The soaring new engineering buildings. Somehow, it's become home.

I continue drifting in the damp gloom. Back to where it all started: the collection of white cubes on Scarman Road.

Silently I walk down the now-hushed corridors of the business school. The coffee nook. The printer corner. The syndicate rooms. The student lounge. Remembering all the moments of the last six months: the frustrations, the late nights, the syrupy fog of breaktime doughnuts and the clacking vooosh of the coffeemaker. The conversations, the headaches, the scribbles on whiteboards. And the laughter. Amid the toil, there was a lot of laughter.

All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to say goodbye.

Post mortem: Modelling & Analysis

Executive Summary: Starting from a poor quality dataset with high STEM, the SD of a 50% probability reduced with a positive effect on the Confidence Interval!

MAM is one of the really hard MBA courses - building and interpreting Excel tools that optimise or maximise KPIs for business - and everyone's been dreading this one. Oddly, I found it strangely do-able.

In my business 'modelling' means making a prop for a photoshoot, so I was expecting performance to be, er, somewhat sub-Distinction level. It's an 'open book' exam (you're allowed to bring in notes) so last night I formulated a survival strategy: take in some model answers, whip through the 15 essay-type questions doing all the ones similar to my models, and leave the ones I just don't get (*cough* regression and sensitivity *cough*) to the end. Ultimately, although I know I didn't max out more than two or three questions markwise, I felt good enough about enough of them to feel pretty sure I've passed this one.

But as an aside: do WBS lecturers have informal competitions as to who can put the weirdest businesses in question format? The businesses that've appeared on exam papers this week include a chicken-breeding magazine, a maker of bicycles built for four people, a company making tapestries of witches to hang in your kitchen (it had a capacity of 15,000 a year, but who on EARTH would buy such a thing?) and a china tableware company that suddenly decided to go into industrial air filters. Are these guys laughing at us or what?

Post mortem: Marketing Strategy

Executive Summary: FINALLY an easy one. Let's face it, if I found an exam with 'marketing' in the title difficult I'd need to seriously re-evaluate my life.

Two essays from a choice of eight, both with elastic subject matter I can fit a number of possible diagrams to to show I DID listen in class. There's something for everyone here. One of my essays, though, ends up being based on my personal experience of segmenting history (geographics, demographics, then psychographics) rather than an amalgam of slides presented; I'm unlikely to get a high mark for it but at least the examiner will find it interesting. This is the first exam I know I've passed, and in such exams it's good to have a little fun.

However, one thing's really annoying me: the way people TALK in the exam hall, before, after, and even during the exam. They just won't shut up. Mouths are twitching long before all papers have been collected; basically at the first possible moment they think they can get away with it. Why do so many people lack the self-discipline to stay shut up for just TWO FUCKING MINUTES longer?!!!

Post mortem: Management Accounting

Executive Summary: AARGH! Have I crapped out on TWO of the bastard exams? Management Accounting was a nightmare! Maybe I'm just not cut out for this MBA stuff.

What's worse is the course wasn't all that bad: lots of numbers, obviously, but unlike Corporate Finance the concepts of budget-flexing and activity-based costing are mainly commonsensical. Yesterday afternoon I concentrated on variances, since it's the area I was weakest on, and was determined to choose a 'variances' question in Section B today. Of course, there was NO BLOODY VARIANCES QUESTION.

Let's just say I now know why the Ops Strategy elective has so many people in it: it's non-examined...

Anyway, the exam starts badly. The Hall's warmer than yesterday, in the same way the surface of the sun is warmer than an ice cube, but the atmosphere's a bit locker-room since there's only one GIRL around (admittedly the one is a hottie, but I don't function well in 30:1 male dominated situations.) And the paper is REALLY REALLY DIFFICULT.

WBS to MBAs: Ha ha, thought you were starting to enjoy yourselves, did you?

Five choices per question, and every choice A-E is plausible; there's no knocking aside of obviously wrong choices to increase your chances of guessing correctly. Every question, EVERY question, needs either a detailed act of memory or copious calculation to get right. I doubt I even got 50% here. The essay-type question is easier (maybe, just maybe, I picked up a few points) but there was still very little opportunity to bullshit.

And what you really need in an exam is bullshittability.

What's odd is that Management Accounting is a bullshittable subject. It's a lens created by accountants to present a company's operations in a certain light: it's as much a strategic and political tool as a reporting mechanism. That's its whole reason for being. Set people certain targets, contextualise their department in a certain way, demonstrate the method by which advantage is gained, and you've got people gaming the system. If you can get them to game it the way you want, you're onto a winner. You might even make money.

But when the game gets turned back on the gamer - i.e. in an exam - the bullshittability vanishes. Where Corporate Finance yesterday felt borderline but possibly passable, I'm pretty sure quite a few people (including me) will be getting resit invitations (or worse) in the next month or two. Not good.

Exam hell: cold turkey

It's hell not being able to have a glass of wine until THURSDAY. Especially after discovering I am the one person in the 80-strong cohort doing FIVE exams this week. Combination of doing an extra elective this term, plus all my chosens being assessed by exam rather than assignment. I'm the Man.

Hey, if it isn't hurting, it isn't working. Management Accounting tomorrow; time to snuff those variances.

Post mortem: Corporate Finance

Executive Summary: Either I failed the exam, or the airline in Section B got a real bargain on leasing its planes!

That's the central problem with Corporate Finance: you can't really tell if the numbers emerging from the equations 'feel right'. A discount factor of .8972 or .7118 - both are on the table, both are plausible, but put the first in Year 0 instead of Year 1 and you're screwed by multiple tenths of a percent in the final cost-of-capital figure. Of such mistakes are global economic meltdowns made.

There are other bad luck questions: the very first multiple-choice is on mortgage payback periods, the simplest equation in all of Corporate Finance, and it's NOT ON THE FORMULA SHEET. Bad start, bad start. But even worse, the temperature of the Sports Hall was a fraction of a degree above Absolute Zero. (When people from Siberia say it's cold, it MUST be true.)

But the basic issue remains: the intractibility of applying Corporate Finance to the real world. I'm a real-world person with an interest in the inchoate; does that explain why the subject interests me, but also why I'm so monumentally crap at it?

The problem with Corporate Finance is that it's a shared delusion: only real as long as enough people are willing to suspend their disbelief. It's why the whole subprime mortgage mess - which now threatens to tip the entire world economy into a slump - is happening. Because a rich white guy on Wall Street thought an unemployed guy in a rotting crackhouse on the bum side of Alabama could, properly spun, be an insanely great financial asset. He didn't think once of how his spreadsheets and sliced-and-diced CDOs applied to the real world.

The CFO of Goldman Sachs - presumably the smartest financial guy at the smartest financial group in the world - explained away such vast errors of judgement as '25-standard-deviation events, happening several days in a row.' Look buddy, 25 S.D. events just DON'T HAPPEN. Britain's recent earthquake - the first in decades - was perhaps a 2 S.D. event, and on the asymptotic scale of the Normal Distribution, 25 S.D's would've happened about once since Ug the Caveman was the man of the moment. For such events to have happened on several consecutive days - well, it'd be less surprising if a herd of Aptosaurii materialised in Hyde Park and started dancing the timewarp.

What happened, but which CFO Vinar didn't understand, was that his complex financial models were simply wrong. Not even in approximation, but in fundamental assumptions. Just - wrong. Yet to him - and to a thousand other City and Street movers and shakers - they represented reality better than reality itself.

[AAAARGH! I've just realised I forgot to add back the initial cost of the planes in both instances, which would have made A2 and B4 planes much closer competitors!!!] (But this illustrates my point: I'm applying my models to the real world. At least when I'm wrong I KNOW I'm wrong.)

I don't know if I've passed or failed Corporate Finance, but if I fail, it's because of those bloody aircraft. Well, I suppose that's appropriate given that 'winging it' is the only life philosophy I've ever had any success with.

The skydiving take on Corporate Finance

An image from the skydiving course has stayed with me: de-gloving your hand. It's what (can) happen if, for example, you don't remove your watch before jumping and a stray cable whips off the watch at 120mph, taking all the skin on your hand with it.

(Yes, at first I thought it just meant pulling off your gloves, too.)

I wonder if there are equivalent expresions for other parts of your body? De-socking your foot? De-epauletting your shoulder? Or even de-balaclava'ing your head?

The last would be exceptionally nasty, but let's face it, it'd be a grand exit - landing with a bloody grinning skull where your face used to be. Since you're going to die anyway, the best thing to do would probably be to get someone to pour petrol over you and set fire to your head. "Newsflash! A skydiver from Warwick's been revealed as the Ghost Rider!"*

So what's this got to do with Corporate Finance? As possibly the hardest of Warwick's elective courses, Corporate Finance revision has been having a similar effect on my brain as that stray cable on a watch-wearing wrist. I feel that learning one more equation or methodology is going to 'de-Finance my brain', and all the stuff I've already learnt will be blown away.

Revising this subject (and two others, to be fair: there are only two exams I feel confident of passing next week) has become less about getting a good score and more about survival. Four techniques - NPV, WACC, bond pricing, and CAPM - are bound to feature in more than 50% of questions, so I'm concentrating on learning these four methods and sod everything else.

The reason for this is that revision as-you-go-along hasn't been possible this term; too much time taken up in groupwork and projects. I've had to fit basically all my study into the last seven days, and it just hasn't worked. I'm hardly the only person having problems, but all the same I can't wait for the next few days to be over.

*This does NOT imply I enjoyed the Nicholas Cage film of the Ghost Rider character, which ranks among the worst films ever made.

Yesterday's news

The switchover's happened. Halfway through the MBA, with team projects and groupwork over, and the Modular MBA crowd have taken over 'our' part of the WBS building. Syndicate rooms, coffee space, even printers are surrounded by an invisibile force field that clearly states: You Fulltimers Are No Longer Welcome Here. Stories abound of being physically pushed aside at photocopiers.

It is perfectly obvious what has happened here.

With the most structured teaching finished, the 2007 intake is now yesterday's story. We have been abandoned to our fate, shunted into the gaping maw of weekly crammers and Project & Dissertation terms: no longer an 80-strong group of the 'special ones', but now merely faces in the vasty crowd of ALL Warwick's MBAs, modular to executive to distance learning, a cast of thousands. We have been tossed aside like an outdated case study. On the fulltime programme, the focus will now be on the 2008 intake, marketing the Warwick MBA to a fresh crowd of hopefuls and getting those GMATs and signatures done in another round of the endless business of adult education. And it hurts.

Of course, we all knew this would happen. But when you've been working in each others' pockets for months, you get territorial about the little spaces you inhabit; some of us have spent multiple all-nighters in those little Syndicate rooms, and now the syndicates are no more, the rooms have been re-allocated. To Executive people. To Distance Learning people. To Modular people.

(What is a 'modular person' anyway? Can you take them apart, unscrewing their heads and limbs, and click them back together in different configurations? Are they posable?)

I only just got here, but there's a feeling now that my year out is already starting to end.

I am not very good at Corporate Finance

I thought I'd enjoy Corporate Finance, and I do, but over the last eight weeks I've realised I'm just no good at it. Equations, breaking problems into parts, looking at the big picture, and taking views on things: these are all the things I'm good at. ("One of the world's top copywriters", remember?) But somehow I just haven't gripped this subject. I don't feel the relationship between Rd and Re in my bones; don't have an instinct for what beta does, can't remember the Capital Asset Pricing Model offhand. This'll all change in the next two weeks - it HAS to with an exam coming up - but right now, everything's nowhere near as solid as it should be.

Which means the presentation today is going to go REALLY well. A class audience including two lecturers (the aforementioned Teutonic and Italianate ones) after a week of 4am mornings. An audience who, like me, have spent a lot of hours recently trying to understand the case study and are itching to ask questions on where we went wrong.

The principle of such things is: DON'T just 'take them through the information' - take the information THROUGH THEM!!!

I run through the numbers, about HALF of which my addled brain gets fully. Assumptions, views-taken, and arbitrary rationalisations are the order of the day. Then the questions start. Here's how I'd LIKE the question session to go:

"Why is the risk-free rate 8.95%?"

"LOOK - it just fucking IS, alright?! So sue me!"

"Why did you choose Quinta as the base for working out divisional WACC?"

"That's a very, very good question. Let me answer it with a question of my own."

And so on. We handle the actual questions as a team, and it all goes fine, but I'm concerned at just how few of the calculations I have committed to memory despite spending seven hours on this (and that's just me; probably 30 hours all-in from the team.)

But as this second MBA term draws towards its close, that's another hurdle leaped. Even if I'll never be able to use the word 'hurdle' again without linking it with 'rate'.

Power to the People

When they cut the power, the People must make Power of their Own.

Beard-stroking liberals aren't a common sight on commercially-focussed Warwick University - and least of all at the ultra-capitalist Business School - but when the electrons stopped flowing today, things got uglier than a hairy leftie on a bad hair day.

Yes, there were power cuts across campus. Possibly connected to the 'quake last night, where 5000 students woke up and... fondly thought they had company. In the dusty aftermath, this top-tier university acquired a third-world electricity network for the afternoon.

In the MBA section, the lesser syndicate groups were walking out in disgust, stripped of their power by... lack of power. Hardier syndicates gamely stayed on, forgetting the PCs and PowerPoints and resorting to... actual conversation, can you believe it.

There were demonstrations of undergrads in the darkened corridors, chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT? NET PRESENT VALUE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!" in Chinese accents. OK, only joking, but the point is made.

The coffee machines were off. The security-carded doors were open to all. (Yes, ALL. Undergrads in the postgrad wing. Science people taking shortcuts back to Lakeside. Even... shock horror... LIBERAL ARTS TYPES?!!) Civilisation, truly, neared its end today. It was a strange kind of chaos: quiet, accepting, yet utterly apocalyptic, like the 2000 neocon takeover of the US government that set the USA's respect in the world back 75 years.

And when at last the power came back on, we felt... cleansed. But at the same time, slightly disappointed. Our NPV and ROI focussed lives had been given a taste of what it's like to live... off the grid.

And some of us, perhaps, liked it a little.

The bear pit

In the last five minutes of the Corporate Finance lecture, the room erupts into absolute chaos!

The scheduling for an assignment handed out is tight, and this late in the term everyone's fighting to keep up with the work, so nerves are on edge. But time isn't the fundamental problem: scheduling is. Everyone here is a member of at least 4 syndicate groups, each a different set of people (I'm in 5) and there is NO commonality of calendaring.

What this means is that everyone in the room has to agree a meeting time. And they have to do it RIGHT NOW, no question, because if the decision slips into email or the weekend it'll be impossible to get answers. A frenzy of shouts and gesticulations rises to fever pitch in seconds, not helped by the fact that not many people know who's in their designated group.

Shouted back row: "Yo! Can we talk a second?"

"Need to negotiate! Let's do this deal now."

"How's everyone fixed for Monday evening?"

"Monday?"

"How about Monday afternoon?"

"I've got POM!"

"There might be a session Wednesday morning!"

"Wednesday afternoon! I bid Wednesday afternoon!"

"Thursday evening reports poor third-quarter results!"

"Pork Bellies! Pork Bellies at 81 4/32!"

OK, I made the last two up, but you see my point. It's like being in the bear pit of the New York stock exchange! For a full four minutes the 'trading floor' is a nerve-jangling web of palpable tension and frustration, alliances and trading positions being formed and re-formed second by second, as factions and raiders mount their assaults on each other's calendars. Shouting down the weak and filling their boots with the strong.

My opening bid to acquire Monday evening gets rejected by a determined duo of asset-strippers in Row 2, but my exploratory Put option on midweek yields a head-and-shoulders shape on the graph. I short-sell Wednesday afternoon in the hope of talking up the less liquid Wednesday morning, and suddenly everyone's buying Wednesday before lunch (which everyone will miss, of course, lunch being for wimps). I cut my losses on Monday - if you can't take your losses, you shouldn't be in the market - and fill my boots with Wednesday morning. It's agreed. The culture of the Bear Pit has produced another result. Wow, that was INTENSE!

Where are my red braces?

Everyone is giving the Corporate Finance lecturer a hard time today

A room full of inquisitive and intelligent people will always have questions when being taught new concepts, and the MBA crowd is a pretty gregarious bunch. We've switched Corporate Finance lecturers for the second half of the course, and she's never more than thirty seconds into an explanation before half a dozen people butt in with questions.

This is, of course, THE MOST ANNOYING THING IN THE WORLD.

Did Isaac Newton drop his quill formulating s=ut+(0.5*at^2), and switch to calculating the effects of sunlight and wind resistance on the bloody falling apple, before he'd pinned down the underlying simplicity of the concept? NO. The whole point here is to understand the THEORY first, clean and untouched, so you can recognise it through all the dirt of the real world that obscures it later. But nobody is getting this.

Can we - just TRY - absorbing the fucking THEORY first before complicating it with irrelevant fudge factors? Why is everybody trying to include the whole world in the model before gripping the basics? Are they really that much smarter than me? GET WITH THE PROGRAMME, PEOPLE.

Admittedly, some of it may be due to the previous lecturer's Teutonic roots and the current one's Italian heritage: there's rather a difference in teaching styles. Accuracy and precision are an ingrained part of the German national character; among Italians they're - er - perhaps not seen as quite so fundamental. Attention to detail on the lecture slides is more 1970s Lancia than BMW X5 (4 of 7 slides contain numerical errors.) But that's not what's causing the problem. The problem is Us.

And to pick one isolated example - let's just say that when two Italians are talking from different perspectives, "Can I just finish my sentence" is something of a futile request.

What's odd is that the concept being taught is, at heart, REALLY SIMPLE. It's nowhere near as complicated as IRR or bond valuation; it's more intuitive and real-world. This should be one of the easier lectures, yet it takes forever to get past each slide.

My colleagues are going through an exercise in MISSING THE FUCKING POINT here, and it's exasperating. Or maybe - since I'm the one annoyed by it - the one who's missing the point here is ME. Just wish I knew what that 'point' was.

Management Accounting is a lot like... making love to a beautiful woman

Guest lecturer today, and he's rather good. Articulate, affable, intelligent and personable with relevant experience in the financial field up the wazoo.

Unfortunately, he also looks exactly like a a famous character from a 1990s British comedy show and the Brits in the room spend the hours in the shaking silence of barely suppressed merriment.

Now, when you sit in the front row most of the time this does NOT come as a welcome touch of humour in the tortured second term of an MBA; it's terrifying. Every minute, every second, I'm on the verge of corpsing into fits of helpless laughter.

With an iron will I steady myself. (NO! NOT an iron will! That sounds like something Swiss Tony'd have! "Stopping yourself from laughing is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman... you need an iron willSTOP!!!) The next case study numbers come up on the big board.

I am hoping - fervently - that the business won't be a used car dealership. If that happens I won't be able to stop myself.

Luckily it's a hotel chain. ("Running a hotel is a lot like...STOP!") I DARE not glance around at the other Brits; I'm certain EVERYONE is seeing the joke here, but they're protected by a row or two of people. Why oh why do I always have to sit at the front?!!

He's got all the traits Swiss Tony would have if he were a real life person: i.e slightly more authentic and less exaggerated. He's possibly the actual person Swiss Tony was based on: a certain suaveness and assumed gravitas that are easily parodied, just on the right side of caricature and ripe for pushing over the edge into comedy. Which of course makes it all the more comical. Help me, I can't stand it!

After about 1000 years or so it's time for the coffee break, and five adult males collapse in hysterics. Only 90 minutes to go. We can make it, I think.

Management Accounting. You've got to keep your figures in shape, plan your activities for maximum payback, and drive down deeply and repeatedly into the relevant areas. In fact, it's a lot like making love to a beautiful woman.

I am The Resolver

I resolve things.

It's just what I do.

Communication problems in an MBA module. A valuable guy the class somehow isn't gelling around, lots of surface friction preventing value being unlocked. I get people talking, then try to get past the personalities and search for the problems. Feeling around blindly on the dark ocean floor of base human behaviour swilled through the imperfect sieve of language, I slowly bubble-sort the issues. Then start to unpick them.

And sometimes when you unpick issues, they can be quite simple. A bit of talking, a day of polling, and what needs to be done is clear. So I do it. Invest a few hours, out-of-hours, diplomatically politicking between parties, gradually seeing the problems for what they really are: just typographical errors on the page of life.

And it works. The comments and emails post-resolution are still coming in.

I am The Resolver. I resolve things. It's just what I do.

I can resolve anything.

Anything except the endless conflicts within myself.

A new dawn

OK, after a great Friday I've bounced back a bit; it's amazing what the buzz of the City around me, a real release of pent-up tension, and a few glasses of wine in intelligent company can do. Getting there and back in a day really blows the budget for a student, but I just need to do this stuff once a month or I really would go under. Life is about having opportunities, and every time my train pulls into Euston I get that tingling sensation of Possibility Everywhere.

The day made a difference. I was glowing so much that back at Coventry Station a guy asked to share a taxi back to the University, thinking I was "a second year". Which would make me about 21. (At which point I almost offered to have his children.)

But this weekend I've GOT to knuckle down to those Corporate Finance questions, with only a burger at Varsity likely to break the monotony. Life is hard. As it should be.

Warwick climbs the rankings... again

According to the new FT MBA survey, Warwick's MBA programme is now in the world's top 30. Edging past longtime rival Cranfield and leaving famous names like Carnegie Mellon, Imperial College, and Thunderbird in the dust. A great result, especially considering Warwick's egalitarian admissions policy, which looks for 'interesting' people (often older and with esoteric backgrounds) rather than thrusting one-dimensional young banker types (Hi, Oxford Said!)

Warwick treats the FT list as key, although I prefer the Economist's, which uses slightly more esoteric criteria but 'feels right' somehow. Nobody outside North America bothers with the Business Week rankings; whatever anyone says, they're COMPLETELY American biased, with even the 'international schools' list concentrating on... Canada.

But the FT ranking is great news, and you know what? It's only going to get better.

Today I'm submitting an assignment for the strangest of the compulsory modules, Practice of Management: a new course in 'soft skills' designed to answer the complaint that MBA graduates are too quantitative and not people-focussed enough. Like all newly-introduced courses, POM is rather obviously not bedded-in yet, and grumbling among the cohort is continuous.

The lectures - delivered by outside consultants including the great Nicholas Bate - are often individually very good; the problems here are with coherence. There's no strong sense of each session being part of a larger whole. There's a bigger issue with the project part; if you've got some years of business experience already, the briefs are insultingly simplistic yet labour-intensive, reducing the value-add: it's just busywork. The 'real world experience' is all very well, but most of us came here to escape the real world for a while and learn something with academic rigour without the goo and dribble of the real world intruding. But all this misses the point.

The point is that POM is a work in progress. Every year it'll get tweaked and tuned, and in a decade it could be a world-beater, capable of putting Warwick into the top 10 all on its own. I hope WBS takes every opportunity to make that happen.

The volume of homework given in Corporate Finance class is really quite amazing

Make no mistake, Corporate Finance is a difficult module for a non-quant. Of course this is why City types get paid so well - finance is that killer combination of both difficult and boring. It's serious 'hard work'.

And it remains hard work even when you're getting it right. I got most of last week's set correct, making me feel like a Master of the Universe in class today - but getting to grips with the concepts strongly enough to answer the questions took SEVEN HOURS on Wednesday, and that's in addition to the textbook readings, re-readings, and revision plus of course the lectures themselves. I estimate Corporate Finance takes about three times as much time per week as any other module.

Or four times if you concentrate on this week. The next problem set is TWELVE questions long, some with up to eight parts involving multiple subcalculations. Now assuming the NPV of the course is on the SML as applied to MBA modules, the yield of the module over the 10-week time-to-maturity is only slightly more than 33% of the expected return if calculated in accordance with second-order Taylor and discounted at a constant rate...!

Tonight's star billing, "Management Accounting", is brought to you by...

... a medley of Pink Floyd, Psychedelic Furs, and Procol Harum. I sort of like things that exploded into smithereens years before (even) I was born, and anyway, I need something reasonably mellow when I'm catching up on textbooks. Chapters 9-12 are on the cards and I'm hoping to get through before midnight.

What the hell is with the Warwick MBA, anyway? Relaxation is a luxury, sleep a decadence. This term contains fewer courses (for most people) and fewer projects (for most people) so should be a breeze compared to Term 1. But I, of course, am not Most People, so I'm awake until all hours cramming my skull with equations and context.

Back to the books...

Creativity vs. hard work

The Japanese turns his head quizzically and states, "Ah, these creative things, I find so hard. I wish I could learn to do such things."

What the FUCK?

I'm trying to revise something titled 'Specification Variable Estimation in Regression Analysis', spanning two textbooks, two modules, and about four cups of coffee. I've got a reasonable head for figures but this stuff is unaccountably HARD.

The Japanese, however - who finds this stuff 'easy' - is pointing towards a crop of campaigns in the corner that took less than two hours to conceive, write, and design. It's one of the simplest advertising campaigns I've ever written.

How the FUCK could anyone find this stuff hard? It's just words and pictures, arranged in a certain way, optimised to sync with enough nuances of human communication to make it likely to provoke some sort of response, cocktailed with a sizeable bullshit factor.

Hell, unlike maths, it doesn't need to be anywhere near exact; you just have to be able to argue it out artfully. (What, exactly, would happen if you wrote 'The answer may vary by up to 100% due to the fallibility of the human condition' on a Corporate Finance exam paper?)

Mathematics isn't part of normal human experience; beautiful it may be (I've read a fair bit of string theory and the geometry of physics is awe-inspiring) but it takes serious sweat to understand the numbers behind nature. And in some ways, the closer it gets to everyday experience (Management Accounting and Corporate Finance) representing it as numbers seems ever more artificial. How the FUCK can anyone find this stuff easy?

And how can anyone find creativity hard?

Where did the day go?

Ha ha. I thought at the start of term that with FOUR afternoons a week unscheduled things might be a litttle less hectic. Yeah, right.

A lecture finished at 1pm, then a brief interview upstairs, then some errands 'downtown' (central campus) involving dry cleaning and juggling cash between bank accounts ready for the huge-ass fee debit this week, a snatched baked potato at the Arts Centre and last week's Economist devoured for lunch. Then home, a conf call scheduled in, laundry wet and dry parts straddling the call, all of which works with only a small hint to my client that she's called while I was leaving the campus launderette. Work sheets printed for tomorrow's marathon lecture day, today's notes filed into a sequence that'll make sense when I write up my flashcards, and OH HELL IT'S PAST SIX PM. Where did the day GO?!!

At least the laundry contains another of those amusing Warwick University Accommodation signs. You've got to laugh, haven't you.

The MBA Sleeper's Guide

"So you've embarked on an MBA programme at Warwick Business School? Well done! The Warwick MBA is your key to a happier life, a higher salary, lots of international friends, and more sexual frisson than you can shake a stick at. But there's one essential skill you'll need to survive, and that's SLEEPING IN UNUSUAL PLACES.

You don't get much time for slumber on the MBA; comfortable room or not, you will NOT spend much time in your bed this year. Beds are for reading up on the next day's lectures and for doubling as surrogate deskspace, not for getting shut-eye. In addition, take a close look at those blankets. There's a reason the smart kids bring their own duvets; own-brand Warwick bedding resembles 18th-century Prussian Army surplus.

So you need to find alternative venues for sleeping - and artful ways of arranging your schedule to do it. By far the most convenient place to sleep is the MBA lecture hall itself, but this is fraught with danger. There are three attitudes to adopt if you go down this route.

Best is to sit at the back, where the comforting hum of chatter will ensure a pleasant hour of slumber with low risk of the lecturer noticing. If you don't bag one of the highly-prized back row seats, try the middle rows, but NOT near the doors: people needing the toilet will be endlessly crashing through the exits. Try to maintain an upright posture and you stand a fair chance of dozing for up to five minutes undisturbed. Beware, however: several of your cohort enjoy using digicams; your slumbering visage WILL be on Facebook before the day's out.

For the really brave, the front row beckons. You'll be noticed, but front-row people get plaudits for keenness, so the lecturer may let sleeping students lie (and you'll avoid the 'Nemotocam'.) At least one person in the 07 cohort just doesn't give a damn and sleeps for approximately 2.5 hours of each 3.5 hour lecture.

However, outside the politically-charged environment of the lecture hall, numerous other business school locales offer creative sleeping possibilities. The MBA coffee lounge is fairly private, but all the chairs are upright; you could move a few tables together, but space-starved MBA candidates may start using your body as a worksurface. Better to go for one of the sofas at the Radcliffe end of the building; it's public and full of much younger people than you, but since you're old enough to pass for a lecturer you will not be disturbed.

The absolute gold standard, of course, is the circular meeting room over the main entrance, but for obvious reasons it's usually locked. Staff need somewhere to sleep too.

If you can bag one alone, Syndicate rooms are an excellent choice. The doors are lockable, the chairs are soft, and best of all, if you're in there people will think you're actually working! These qualities, however, mean you can't count on a syndicate room being available more than a few times a week. Wednesday mornings are best since that's the lecture everyone feels able to skip, so many MBA participants won't be in school.

There are other possibilities. Like a good hotel, WBS is full of little-known nooks not normally on student itineraries. There's a cleaner's storeroom west of the entrance; a warm IT office eastwards, and the smaller staff corridors upstairs are regularly deserted for hours at a time. If you're REALLY nice to the coffee break caterer, she might let you crash in the back of the serving area for an hour or too. And if you're simply too tired to get creative, there are always the soft options: trekking over to the library or Learning Grid usually yields half a sofa, and best of all there'll be books to cover your face with!

In emergencies, there are a few - a very few - other possibilities. The upper-floor lecture halls at the back end are quieter and there are a few sofas; also, strategic use of coathooks can, with effort, enable a few minutes of 'straphanging' slumber. It may even be possible to bag a complete lecture hall of your own, and simply lie behind a table. In this situation, scatter a few textbooks around you as if you fell over; when disturbed, simply rub your head, gesture at the table edge, and say 'Ow!' with a pained wince. Complete the deception by asking the person who disturbed you for a glass of water.

I wish you all the best with your studies. And... sweet dreams!"

Five forces forced in within five days

Ha ha, just a few days after I blog about it,today's Strategic Advantage lecture was about Porter's Five Forces! These Warwick programme directors are FAST to react. (!)

Down and dirty in the SU

I don't quite 'get' Warwick's Student Union.

At any one time, half the bars and kitchens are either closed or devoid of customers. And the opening times seem fairly random, too. For instance, there's a paid-entrance party on at 11pm, so the whole downstairs area shuts down at 10pm and everyone has to leave and come back again.

The crowds seem equally elusive. I've walked through here on Friday evenings and the place is packed; other times, like this Friday, it's practically empty. Us postgrads obviously don't have that finely-tuned undergrad sense of where the Happenings are. Nine bars and six restaurants at the last count, yet it's always odds on the place you're heading for will be shuttered.

Tonight it's a party to welcome the new crop of exchange MBAs from Mannheim, and they're a little... different to the last lot. Man, these guys are TALL. It's like talking to trees. And not just the guys: the girls are so statuesque I half expected modelling agents to be scouting the joint.

Seeing their heads jutting above the less-lofty Warwickers make it look as if the entire cohort has been transplanted into Sherwood Forest, and the illusion's even more appropriate when you consider the rainstorm outside is somehow penetrating the ground floor of this 3-storey building... via the roof. (Makes me wonder what this dripping water went through to get here.)

We enjoy a 'few' beers, and end the evening upstairs in The Graduate pub. The appalling weather has created some interesting olfactory effects, and the floor - let's just say it has noticeable adhesive qualities. But there's still time and room to chat to our new colleagues, about their motivations, their dreams, their hopes for the future. (Actually, those involve beer too.)

Porter's five WHATs?

What, exactly, does Warwick Business School have against Michael Porter?

The guy who kicked off management consultancy is a core part of approximately 4,999 of the world's 5,000 MBA schools. Except, it seems, Warwick's.

There has been NO SESSION about Michael Porter; his five forces have been mentioned in passing maybe twice. Yet every single lecture, there's at least one comment about him and his work - especially as it relates to us.

"You MBA students can doubtless talk about Porter's Five Forces until the cows come home..."

"Now, remind me what Porter's Five Forces are?"

"Obviously you'll have covered Porter's Five Forces in depth during the first term..."

We haven't 'done' Porter AT ALL. I'm not sure we need to - any more than elementary school kids need to read Euclid - since the principles are now so embedded in business strategy the actual originator has perhaps become obsolete - but damnit, if they think we should study Michael Porter, they should bloody well say so. Porter's not even on the reading list. Nor is his most famous work in the bookshop.

Here's my theory: this is the one area of joined-up education where the programme directors don't talk to each other. They're all taking it for granted. All the lecturers think every other lecturer is overdosing on Michael Porter, and don't bother putting him in their own lectures.

The net result: not a single lecturer is teaching Michael Porter, and we know him by reputation alone. Unless - and this is a long shot given the workload - we like, y'know, actually read his book on our own initiative or something. Dear me.

Vive la France!

I would like, if I may, to take you... on... a strange journey.

A journey of a compulsory MBA evening language class. Held outside the warm womblike environment of our beloved business school, of cool corridors and sensible layouts. Into, so to speak, foreign territory.

I'd thought the class was in the b-school itself; the room designation (B*.**) was in the business school's logical room format. You never get lost in the Modernist cubes and circles of WBS; just aim down a corridor and count along. Sadly, the rest of the campus isn't like that; an American pal had pre-warned me about Humanities, but I'd brushed away her warnings without a care.

Merde!

The journey starts with that worst of all B-movie decisions: to split up. Two African girls of the quartet gathered in the lobby have an errand to run, so I pair up with K** and depart speaking the Line You Must Never Say in a Horror Movie:

"We'll meet you over there!"

After all, the actual venue is mere minutes away, in the next building or so, according to our vague directions. How hard can it be to find it?

8 buildings, 22 doors, and 57 corridors later, we make a terrible discovery... of which more later.

OK, OK, so it wasn't really 57 corridors we explored trying to find a blasted French class. (It couldn't have been more than 52.) But know this: we spent nearly a WHOLE HOUR traipsing around campus trying to find mythical room B*.**. This is how it went.

Our journey begins in the Ramphal quadrangle I know well: it's a shortcut to parts of central campus. We don't start getting nervous until we've tried all four entrances and NO ONE knows of any room starting with B. We leave. And re-enter through another door. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This building is built like Meccano: about 12 interconnected long arms with relatively few connecting doors between wings, and it's a bit too easy to get disoriented. The Lurking Horror comes to mind again.

OK, tramp down University Road, enter the Library, sort of, which we do several times over the next hour since our first set of directions start there. Of course, being an individual room buried in a building, the French room IS NOT A PART OF THE LANGUAGE CENTRE so everyone we ask about Languages directs us THERE instead.

The Language Centre is a strange kind of place, more like a 'proper' University: peeling paint and faded brickwork, back to the last great wave of British college-building in the 60s. And, of course, it's not where we're supposed to be. There's a 67, a 52, but nothing with f***ing B*.** in the title. Will our heroes make it out alive? Tune in next week!

At this point, K** is starting to believe my claims about being bad at directions.

We leave and re-orient within Ramphal. My phone rings anonymously. It's B***, one of the African girls supposedly bringing up the rear, in reality now far ahead of us. "We're in the Business School Lounge. Bye!"

What the FUCK are they doing in the Business School Lounge? That's where we've just come from!!! Oh well, one problem at a time.

We try the Library again, but entering through an upper floor this time. Well, it's in the right place, damnit; can it really be so wrong to trust a map?

I call another known participant of the class. Oooops; a slurred voice comes online: she's sick in bed and I've woken her up. Is there ANYTHING else I can do tonight to piss off African women?!!!

Momentarily, we consider the Chemistry building, but that'd be one mix-up too many; it might prove explosive; something just smells bad about that decision. (OK, enough chemistry jokes already.)

Our search pattern has now broadened - from rooms, to corridors, now it's just buildings where the rooms have a B in the title. We attempt Psychology ("Where Reason and Intelligence are Found" - not tonight they're bloody not!) and then think better of it.

Everyone knows Social Science is easy, so we head into there. It turns out to be a morass of abstruse corners and impenetrable labyrinths. We re-emerge into the cold night air some time later with relief.

We then plunge into various Humanities blocks. Now I have an American friend who knows these corridors well, and she'd warned me it's like a rabbit warren in there; stupidly I'd failed to heed her warnings. Actually, rabbit warren is kind of polite. It's like a fucking termite mound!

K** asks a passing undergrad. We're ready to believe she knows where the French lessons are, given that she's wearing a sweatshirt with an Eiffel Tower logo. (OK, at this stage we're clutching at straws... we've asked some 5 extremely polite people yet not one has really been able to help.)

And then we have a brainwave. A map taped to a door on an upper floor shows a room - several corridors away - one pre-decimal-point digit removed from the one we want. We reason, if we can find THAT room and then find some stairs leading down, the room we want will logically be directly below it.

A final push along 6 corridors and a flight of stairs. And, unbelievably, it works. *.32... *.33... *.39... We stumble upon room B*.**. An hour late.

Where there's a sign on the door: "MBA French class, this room was pre-booked so we have moved to A*.**."

Which is where we started our journey, 50 minutes previously. Back at the Business School.

In a sense, I've been right all along. But for entirely the wrong reason.

It's now 55 minutes after the class began.

Sacre bleu!

When we emerge via a nearby door at the end of the corridor - which we'd approached from a totally different direction - we learn that, indeed, it's quite close to the Business School, although through shortcuts of gates and paths rather than along the main campus thoroughfares.

At which point, we collapse in laughter and decide, in true French style, to say "f**k it" and go for a glass of wine instead.

Vive la France!

I think that I shall never see, a life so lovely as a tea... cher

What a life it is to be an academic.

I've been in a university environment over three months now, and I can safely say there's a reason so many lecturers seem so happy. I mean, compared to the hardscrabble, living-on-the-edge, risk-filled rollercoaster of private business, being an academic is one seriously cushy number. Sometimes I feel like one of HG Wells' Morlocks accidentally emerging from his hellish subterreanea and glimpsing the verdant paradise above.

First off, academic life is fun. Just imagine the work environment of the average don. You spend time either with people who defer to your superior knowledge (students) or who share your interests (departmental colleagues.) Being an academic is like one long Sunday afternoon in the park with friends.

You get financial security too. Maybe the salaries aren't great, but plenty of academics do private consulting at high rates - and additionally, as civil servants, many academics get an index-linked pension: the gold-plated sort that pays out an ever-increasing, inflation-proof amount without you having to pay in increasing sums. Someone recently calculated that the average private sector manager would need to build up a pension pot of ONE MILLION POUNDS to enjoy the same payouts as the equivalent civil servant. Being an academic means never having to worry about your dotage.

You get a great living environment. Lots of academics live in subsidised housing, some right here on campus: the dreamy, intellectual atmosphere of the ivory towers, combined with annual influxes of young people to keep your ideas fresh. Academics get everything but free backrubs from naked maidens, and I'm pretty sure even that's on offer in the Humanities block. (How come the OB guys always seem such happy souls?)

And the work itself? Well, given that academics always note their 'research interests' on their CVs, isn't that a bit like... 'doing what you enjoy'? Your job involves reading and writing about the stuff you like the most? Does that even qualify as a job? Either way, being an academic offers a great working life.

Of course, you're allowed eccentricities as an academic that the private sector wouldn't let your feet touch the ground for. The scruffiest jeans and jumpers, and barely decipherable handwriting? And some of these eccentricities cost the taxpayer serious money. At Warwick, the maths guys came out in open rebellion some years back, about... the whiteboards in the Maths Department. (They liked blackboards and chalk.) At huge expense, the whiteboards were replaced with blackboards, just to satisfy a bunch of numbers freaks' fits of pique. Being an academic lets you do your own thing, all the time.

Furthermore, under the UK's RAE grading system, you only have a 'performance review' every FIVE years, and even then it's based on just your best FOUR pieces of work. Four pieces?!! In five years?! You could just spend six months producing four really good bits, then goof off for nearly half a decade. Unlike the private sector - with its quarterly earnings requirements, its downsizing habits and its dog-eat-dog culture - being an academic lets you thumb your nose at performance standards.

Oh, what a life is it to be an academic!

Twelve months later

It's been a strange sort of year, 2007.

I was at a crossroads last Dec 31, having realised I didn't want to be a solo marketer any longer but with the alternative (being an outsourced marketing department and recruiting a team) not looking any better.

A month in the desert the previous summer had reconnected me with the planet, but Q3/4 were horrendous as a result. A single full month away in five years had decimated a great roster. I spent Dec 31, 2006 wondering what I'd be in a year's time. Off adventuring for the last time? Working overseas again? Dead drunk on the London streets?

What I never thought, though, was that it'd involve becoming a University student.

But here I am: living on campus at Warwick University a few minutes from the gleaming white geometry of the business school. And just three months outside the madness of London has made everything clear again. I now know what I want to do next.

Here are my goals for 2008:

To rejoin a team. Being solo works when you have no commitments, but when you're selling your time it's hard to make year-on-year upticks to your bottom line, and I'm not getting any younger. So I want fresh resources to leverage: people, technology, capital, in order to make a bigger difference. And that only happens in organisations. So the lone wolf has to rejoin a pack.

To get international again. It's seven years since my work took me outside Europe; side trips to Asia and Africa and America have been just that: holidays. However pleasant having clients in Paris / London / Madrid may be, I miss the business travel that marked my calendar for my first working decade. So whatever I work on next, it'll have to be something that works across borders.

To reconnect with technology. Working with consultancies is great, but to really see how business and markets interact you've got to understand the technologies: why Ajax is exciting (hint: it enables Web 2.0) why UDWDM is a p-shift (hint: it steps up to mass broadband) and why the iPod has nothing to do with selling hardware (hint: it's about control of media distribution.) So I need to re-involve myself in TMT, which in the last year - without a single digital agency as a client - I've missed.

To play strategically. I'm sick of clients whining about my day rate; whatever I earn in my next role will be related to what I do for the business, not what I can squeeze out of their marketing budget. If I want six figures and an option on 1%, I'd better be able to demonstrate additional turnover attributable to my actions. And with the stuff I'm learning on the Warwick MBA, I'll be able to do it.

And of course, sluicing into all that is a more basic goal: to be a better person. To be less cynical. To network with people more, even useless ones. To tolerate fools more gladly. To gather points of view before taking one. To chase material success less. To listen and understand rather than dismiss and judge.

It'll be hard. But - with five new course folders on the shelf, with titles from Corporate Finance to Modelling & Analysis - I'm in the best place to start from.

Happy New Year!

An apology to Deepak

After neglecting to mention him in this farewell to Mannheimers blog, I'd like to make it clear that Dee Pathak (aka 'Deep Attack') is sodding off back to Mannheim too, despite not coming from there in the first place. In addition, the Mannheimers, of which Deepak is now one although he's never been there and wasn't one before, are leaving Warwick to go to not Mannheim, but somewhere in France or Canada. Meaning that one Mannheimer who isn't from Mannheim will not receive a single lecture at Mannheim Business School until the first half of his MBA's over, while ten Mannheimers who ARE from Mannheim will spend a term at Warwick and a term somewhere equally non-Mannheim before returning to Mannheim. (Confused yet? I am.)

I am a bad person: a blog of self-loathing

I'm having a road-to-Damascus moment. (A bit odd, given that today one of my MBA colleagues really is on the road back to Damascus. But that's irrelevant.) I woke up at 1pm with a fading hangover, and I'm blogging this while it's fresh.

In the shower yesterday, just before heading to the end-of-term party, a crushing realisation - one of those experiences so real you just know it's true - hit me.

I am a bad person.

I'm a bad person because I've never needed to be good.

First in the advertising business, then the money-obsessed rat race of London, I've spent my life surrounded by assholes. Maybe the only times I haven't are the times I've travelled: teenage backpacking across the USA, journeys of self-discovery across Asia and Australia, the deserts of north Africa under a searing sky. And those times I travelled mostly alone.

When you're surrounded by assholes, you never notice you're an asshole yourself.

But for three months now I've lived and worked with an eighty-strong new crowd, my MBA cohort. And they're good people. Even the worst of them is better than me (well, there's one worse). People who've made huge sacrifices to better themselves and improve their lives. People with energy and talent, and the fundamentally positive nature that'll let them use it to make the world better: building businesses, improving organisations, developing individuals. Good people.

And I realise now that I'm a bad person. Arrogant, impatient, irritable, dismissive and contemptuous, and those are my better traits.

I spend party night quiet and contemplative, downing glass after glass after glass of white for a solid six hours.

I think I possibly mentioned the fact I'm a bad person to one or two people. I must have bored them shitless. (It's a good job I didn't corner any of them for lengthy conversations or anything.)

Last night was also our last night with the Mannheimers: MBA exchange participants from a German school, and they were the coolest clique in the cohort. Bye friend Fernando, may your scooter never stop. Bye Maina, kooky and beautiful. Bye Katsu, from whom a single sentence could have the cohort collapsing in laughter. Bye the other Fernando; I never knew you well. Bye Tuan, you bicultural brainbox. Bye Sasha, bye Olivia, bye Irina and Tatjana. Bye Allen. It was good to know you all.

I'm a bad person.

But in 2008 I'm going to try really, really hard to be good.

SCHOOOOOOL'S OUT!!!

Exams over! Just a few days completing an assignment, and 2007 is done. A third of my MBA (excluding the project term) is now over bar the partying. And looking back, I can honestly say I wouldn't have changed a thing.

The first-term modules - Accounting & Finance, Economics of Business, Operations Management, Market Analysis, and Organisational Behaviour - were, with the exception of OB, instantly relevant and practical. And even OB demonstrated its value in later lectures: when people behave in a certain way, it's sometimes possible to see why, based on fundamental human traits like motivation, leadership, power, culture, pay/performance, teams, and identity. After the first OB lecture I came home and exploded to my flatmates, "What the FUCK was that all about?!" but overall I'm glad it was a core module; it provided a human aspect to all the numbers and strategy stuff elsewhere. And you can't forget the people.

We've also had some outstanding lecturers. Ben Knight seems everyone's favourite - a brilliant performer and deeply knowledgeable, with a knack for putting economic concepts into everyday experience - but the passion of Stuart Chambers turned humdrum operational management into a warm and rewarding exercise in problem solving, whereas Nigel Piercy's sarcasm-laced Market Analysis lectures were cerebrally stimulating. Accounting was the low point, but low here is still above the merely ok, and let's face it, do you really want a passionate accountant?

And what about POM, 'Practice of Management', the personal and professional development module Warwick's famous for? To be fair, it's been patchy. The least joined-up of the modules - more a grab-bag of seminars than a Great Conversation. Obviously the three-year-old module's still bedding in. But its heart is in the right place, and in another decade it'll be a world-beating USP for Warwick's programme. (It takes a LOT of time to tune a course to goosebump-inducing perfection. And such positive resonance, well taught, is the difference between the world's top 50 business schools and the 5,000 also-rans beneath them.)

I've just picked up my module folders for the Spring, and they form a pleasing sequence along my bookshelf: core modules of Modelling & Analysis and Strategic Advantage, following on from Term 1's strategic environment learnings (Economics) and preceding the Summer Term's putting it into use (Strategy & Practice). A nice thread running through the courses, branching off into a custom programme of electives, half quant and half strategic.

I wouldn't change a thing about this MBA. But I do want it to change me.

Three down, one to go

Market Analysis exam over. Just Operations Management tomorrow, then it's a clear run to the end of Term 1's work with an Economics assignment. What fun.

Next term's working out okay, too, even though I'm doing an ill-advised third elective (increases workload, but it was the only way to get the mix of modules I wanted, half hard quant and half softer strategic stuff.) I must be the only person deliberately doing the stuff I'm no good at - my two big weaknesses in business are finance and strategy; I've always been a seat-of-the-pants creative type whose financial projections tend to be back-of-envelope, best-guess stuff. (Actually, I think that's how professional financiers work as well; it's just that they don't admit it.)

The good thing is, next term all my lectures are in the mornings - four days a week, I have nothing scheduled after 12.30, except for Tuesdays when lectures go on into the evening (doing a language is compulsory on the Warwick MBA, so Tuesday evenings will be filled with the sounds of France.) Three elective modules, two core modules, the POM personal development module, and a language: it may be only seven scheduled sessions a week, but each is of three and a half hours, and with teamwork and projects outside the lecture hall I've a feeling it'll be no less busy than this term.

But at least with lectures over with by 12.30 most days, I have the whole afternoon to use. (With free mornings, it's all too easy to use them to catch up on sleep.) If I race to the pool at 12.30, I can grab a hot lunch at 1.30 before University House cafe closes, then have a straight run from 2pm to late. And with Corporate Finance and Management Accounting on my list, I'm going to need it...

Extreme accounting

Wow! That was INTENSE!!! Is ANYTHING on earth more exhilarating than investment ratio analysis?

OK. That was a joke. I'm definitely not turning into some kind of sad financial bastard, oh dear me no.

But still - the Accounting & Finance exam was pretty extreme. 2 questions in 2 hours, and on each one I (along with everybody else) was writing right up to the wire. I chose a question on cashflow forecasting and another on the RONA pyramid, and learned in CostGouger (where the entire cohort seemed to go shopping afterwards) that I'd missed one really, really important point about the 1000 SKUs the T shirt seller had purchased before starting up in business. Which meant his bank balance didn't dip into overdraft as it was supposed to, making my advice to the business owner (go for it and forget about your bank manager) completely nonsensical, although self-consistent (which is the basis the exam is marked on.) So overall I think I did okay - about 65% I'd guess, definitely a pass even in the worst case. No chance of a Distinction though - T-Shirt-Tony, I curse you.

And I'm fired up! I NEEDED something like this to get me interested/involved in financial matters, and now I feel almost - almost - ready to chat on equal terms with my clients and contacts about jobs next year, after putting Management Accounting and Corporate Finance under my belt too.

Shaky-kneed, blurred, vision, stumbling off the rollercoaster

Term 1 done!

The first quarter of my MBA has been a wild ride, and now the lecture season's over - just a few days of revision, then exams next week - I'm strangely nonplussed. Just as I've settled into my new life, I get reminded that it'll all be over before I know it.

(I only have 3 taught weeks in Term 3 and Term 4 is project/dissertation on site with my client, so effectively I'll be back at work by April.)

It's been a good term though, busy to the point of arrestable violence and hard enough to feel worthwhile.

A Marketing Professor for whom there's been an odd correlation between the professional marketers in the cohort and low assessed scores. (Does this mean academics in marketing are talking crap?) An Economics lecturer who balances hardass macroeconomical graphs with expressions like, 'And we refer to this technically as 'the shit hitting the fan'.' An Operations tutor with so much passion for his subject he can make production lines and decimal minutes interesting. And even the abtruse sociology of Organisational Behaviour has been brought to life by a three-metre tall lecturer.

My personal life isn't where I want it to be, but my new professional direction is all working, and I'm starting to worry less about the next ten years. And that's all I want in life, really: for the endless inner frustration to stop.

I hate revision

You know those days when you leap out of bed at 7 ready to put in a full day of revision for a subject you're weak on and then you start procrastinating like answering a bunch of emails and taking your time over coffee and then making a few phone calls and writing up notes on lectures and attacking bits of odd paperwork that aren't due for weeks and I don't like the way that zoom lens looks on my camera so I think I'll swap it with the prime to make it look smarter on my shelf and rearranging textbooks in a neat line because it feels like you're doing something and then feeling a bit hungry so you wander over to the Arts Centre for lunch and then do a bit of Christmas Card shopping and then trundle back wondering if you've got any more email to answer and oh crap it's already past 1pm...?

Well I'm having one.

Beneath a darkening sky

Sometimes, nightfall in Warwickshire can be just... breathtaking.

These photos were taken about five minutes apart, between 5pm and 5.15. The first's of Warwick Business School, taken from Lakeside student village. No, the school isn't really an ultralong building that goes all the way across behind those trees; there are two buildings of similar architectural heritage on opposite sides of the road, but they're several minutes' walk apart and not connected physically or culturally.

The second pic's taken from the winding path leading from Heronbank to central campus, alongside the freshly-ploughed field where non-performing WBS lecturers end up minus identifying dentition. (Sssshh.)

The third was snapped at central campus, looking across the 'plaza' at Rootes Social Building, where I've never done any socialising (like the Student Union, it's principally an undergrad scene.)

It's amazing how in the right light, a mob of budget-constrained, functional modern boxes - hallmarks of any modern British university - can look arresting, even gorgeous. But of course they can't beat that sky.

Discounting the discounted

OK, revision time for finals week. Net Present Value. Discounted Cash Flow. Gordon's Dividend Growth Model for pricing shares.

Fuck Gordon.

Discounted Cash Flow is a common method of valuing an investment. You take a look at what profit that investment will produce in years to come, 'discount' it accordingly back to the present day (the further out it is, the riskier it is) and you get a Net Present Value. If the NPV is positive, it's a project worth investing in, dependent on a number of other factors like inflation, interest rates, and normal returns. This method is used almost universally by large investment firms as a means of legitimising their investments and making them look good to their clients.

And you know what? It's a complete con job.

The impressive-looking spreadsheets DCF and NPV produce disguise the fact that both models - two basic and interrelated concepts of corporate finance used daily in billion-dollar takeovers - are a fistful of COMPLETE GUESSWORK. In fact, it's worse than guesswork: both ideas generally use the one assumption you can't make, namely that things are going to be the same next year.

That's what the world financial system is based on: a pack of guesses given legitimacy by bigass spreadsheets, the same way supernatural imaginings were given legitimacy by impressive buildings and Latin language in medieaval Europe. The bigger the snow job, the more concrete the result looks.

Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I've got an exam on this stuff in ten days, and then I'm going to start using it.